In the dark, when you’re upside down, soaked in blood and gasoline and your
brain hurts, mud can fool you into believing it’s chocolate.
Angelina’s parents said she should be grateful to the cow who saved her
life, like she should go back to the field in her shiny new wheelchair, say
thanks, maybe pat it’s rump, talk about the elements in mud which make grass
grow and cows eating grass which made milk which was an ingredient of
chocolate.
When they moved her out of intensive care she watched a doctor’s lips
animate as speech bubbles floated upwards: something about frontal lobes. In
post-trauma maelstrom, she feared that frontal lobes was doctor-speak for
breasts, and maybe he was going to carve them up like he’d done to other
parts of her body.
Discovering what frontal lobes were made her think that God, or whoever
was responsible for Everything, would never hold down a job with
Mercedes-Benz. Her dad worked as a mechanic at Benz dealership and swore by
them for safety. Angelina didn’t even know she had frontal lobes, but the
doctor told her that they are at the front of the brain. The bone of the
forehead is smooth on the outside, but - and this is where she felt God’s
design job sucked - on the inside the forehead bone is rough and craggy like
a cliff face. There’s some goo swilling around between the rough bone and
the soft tissue of the frontal lobes which acts as a cushion in case of
minor blows to the forehead, but when your body is hurled forward violently
in an accident like a car crash, the goo doesn’t stop the lobes crashing
onto the jagged rocks, and then your brain hurts.
The frontal lobe job and all the other operations kept Angelina alive,
but she would never walk again. As for not speaking, the doctor said that
not speaking was not physiological, but psychological trauma and she would
talk again one day, but Angelina secretly vowed she never would. Juan would
never walk or talk again because Juan was muerto. He’d been buried in the
mud, but that wasn’t good enough so they dug the Mitsubishi out of the
ditch, cut him out of the wreckage and cremated him. Not many people get
buried and cremated. Lucky throw of the death dice for Juan.
***
Not talking was because Angelina didn’t want to speak about the accident
since she’d have to admit it was her fault, and then maybe she’d be
prosecuted for manslaughter. If she hadn’t punched Juan for flirting with
Vikki Alumerz earlier that evening he would never have skidded off the wet
road into the ditch. And she would never had ended up with dead legs and her
mind all messed up, and by now, they would have kept their pact to make the
trip back to where they belonged.
She had flashbacks. Inside, the outside was all at weird angles because
the car had rolled onto its roof. A sticker on the shattered windscreen had
a red check sign and read Mitsubishi Corporation AOK, but everything wasn’t.
As slimy mud oozed in through the shattered windshield, she imagined robots
in Japan reciting Haiku as they spray-painted an infinity of Mitsubishis
with molten chocolate. She didn’t want to die in a Mitsubishi, and heard her
father hollering heck, why didn’t you date a guy with a Benz?
Angelina was scrunched up against Juan, who had the steering wheel
implanted into his chest and a pair of fluffy dice as an earring. As if
making him crash wasn’t bad enough, her body was pushing his face down into
the mass of liquid chocolate. Unable to move anything but her head, she lay
there crying as stupid love songs blared from the radio whilst she licked
the chocolate off Juan’s face so he could breathe until the mud and worms
and grass and grit made her throw up and the slow brown avalanche slowly
covered his head, leaving only one eyed snakes on the yellow dice visible.
Later, that dumb cow that wasn’t so dumb climbed the grassy knoll above
the ditch and got out through the fence they had knocked down and wandered
onto the road, as if it knew it had to stop a passing car so someone could
call the emergency services.
***
Whereas most people in the walking world had been indifferent to her
passage through life, walkers in the wheelchair world were kind and helpful.
And when they realised she had the further handicap of not being able to
speak and had to communicate by writing on a small whiteboard, they
positively gushed humanity.
Angelina’s parents helped her find a ground floor apartment, insisting
that it must have full length sliding windows to a garden. Declining their
offers of assistance with furnishings, her little whiteboard told them that
she wanted to think about her options, though truth was she’d already made
up her mind.
She wrote a letter to the scrapyard where the wrecked Mitsubishi had been
taken to, and another to the farmer who owned the cow that had saved her
life. Days later, a crane hoisted the Mitsubishi over the garden wall and
three hardhats pushed it through the sliding windows into her empty living
room and the cow was eating the grass on the back lawn.
’It’s leaking oil onto my rug.’ Was all the flabbergasted landlord could
say when he came to investigate complaints made about the cow by neighbours.
’That’s a new rug.’
Angelina raised a finger to her lips before scribbling on her
whiteboard: schhh! Can’t you see my boyfriend’s ghost is asleep in that car?
The landlord looked nonplused. ‘That’s a cow in the garden.’ He
whispered in deference to Juan’s ghost. ‘Lease says no pets.’
Frowning, Angelina scribbled furiously: it’s not a pet, nor a farm
animal. It’s Saint Christopher, patron saint of travellers. Reincarnated as
a bovine.
’Lady,’ the landlord sighed, a hint of irritation overriding the
consideration he had previously shown for her handicap, ‘animals is pets.
And pets is animals. Same difference. Who’s going to milk the damned thing?’
***
Each night, Juan punished Angelina for making him a ghost by forcing
himself on her when she was in bed watching TV. The doors of the Mitsubishi
wouldn’t close properly since the accident, so she duct-taped them closed so
Juan’s ghost couldn’t get out, but somehow he always did. Staggering into
her bedroom on twisted legs, head flapping from side to side on his broken
neck, he’d yank back the blanket, hoist up the T-shirt she slept in, open
her dead legs and pleasure himself, frozen breath smelling of mud, chocolate
and gasoline as he whispered Vikki Vikki into her ear. When raging jealousy
drove her to punch and bite him the congealed blood on his wounds from the
accident would open, the bed ran red with his blood and he’d laugh, light a
cigarette and make her lick the chocolate and worms from his broken body.
***
Saint Christopher ate all of the grass in the garden within three days.
Angelina was drinking tequila from a bottle whilst searching the Yellow
Pages for animal feed suppliers when a letter arrived from the landlord.
’Bet that ain’t no love letter.’ Juan’s ghost yawned from inside the
Mitsubishi. ‘Eviction notice, right? Time to cross the frontier. Get back to
where you belong.’
’I know we made a pact.’ She snapped angrily. ‘But things have changed.
I’m not sure I wanna go back.’
Juan’s ghost licked blood from his lips as he threw the fluffy dice onto
the passenger seat.
’Cariño. You got no choice. Just like gravity decides where dice come to
rest.’
The clomp-clomp of the cow’s hooves on the wooden floor as it entered
the room interrupted their exchange.
’Excuse me for butting in,’ Saint Christopher said, clearing his throat,
’but I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. About making the return
trip. Take a closer look at the black and white patches my hide. See? It’s a
map.’
***
The police stopped them several times on their way out of the city. A
cow with a harness made from duct-tape pulling a cripple in a wheelchair
along the sidewalk wasn’t against the law, but it did arouse curiosity and
suspicion, even in a territory where the prevailing lunacy often hid behind
a straight face.
Each time a squad car pulled up beside them, Angelina picked through the
jumble in her tote bag of tequila bottles, medication and little cakes of
dried mud she’d made for the trip to find her Disabled Person’s card so the
police would believe she really was a crippled person and not a crazy
person.
During these interrogations, Saint Christopher took a perverse pleasure
in emitting raucous and pestiferous flatus in the policemen’s direction,
whilst Juan’s ghost swayed from side to side on his broken legs, swatting
flies away from the empty eye socket above which, affixed to his forehead,
was the window sticker Mitsubishi Corporation AOK.
***
A flock of scrawny vultures soared on thermals beneath an obdurate sun
as they traversed a barren plateau of fine red dust which adhered to their
sweat.
’We’re nearly there.’ Angelina whined, dry tongue clicking on her
palette whilst squinting at the map on Saint Christopher’s hide. ‘Everyone
this side of the frontier is this freakin colour. I been meaning to ask.
What kinda evil does a saint have to do to get reincarnated as a cow?’
Saint Christopher hung his head. ‘The Boss caught me red-handed. Helping
a little girl cross the road. I suspect infiltrators from another realm had
been monkeying with my faculties; a Pavlovian reflex with a subliminal
Nabokov inculcation. I finger-fucked that sweet naiad in the middle of the
road. Admittedly, it was a licentious act, but I was also seeking an
olfactory indicator to the beginning of all this. As patron saint of
travellers, my vocation was to help those on the road. In a larger sense,
that little girl was doing just that. Travelling. The passage from child to
woman. I too was on a voyage. Went a little too far, it seems.’
Animating this confession, Juan, naked, and caked in red dust,
masturbated as he danced a clumsy jig around them, his erection the only
linear member of his fractured and deformed anatomy.
Angelina dug into her tote bag, pulled out the last of the mud cakes and
ate ravenously.
’So,’ she giggled, ‘whaddya you learn from sniffing cunty fingers?’
Saint Christopher’s sigh was weighty with perplexity and melancholy.
’Embracing the cold ocean is preferable to being cast into the inferno. See
this as a trope: when the flames engulfed the seas, their polarities ceased
to be harmonious. In camera, the breakdown could be attributed to a number
of phenomena. Infected alien jissom swallowed by sleeping virgins. Bacteria
released from falling meteorites corrupting the food chain. Tectonic plates
left too long in the microwave. Barbie and Ken’s inevitable divorce.
Semiological interpretations of Rohrsach tests by blind angels. The
Disneyfication of Descartes. Who knows?’
Angelina chuckled, a rivulet of mud dribbling from her parched lips into
the red chasm of her cleavage. ‘You missed frontal lobes. God Corporation
not AOK.’
***
Angelina awoke from a dream where she was being buried alive with dozens
of other bodies. Her mouth and mons veneris felt badly bruised. Odours of
sex, unwashed bodies, excrement, tallow candles and burning flesh filling
her nostrils made her vomit. Close by, she could hear the rhythmic beating
of drums and the crisp crackling of a campfire. Wiggling free of tangled
limbs in which hers were enmeshed, she crawled towards a slash of flickering
light in the darkness, dragging her paralysed legs behind a torso in which
every muscle ached towards the light.
The whites of their eyes alarmingly apparent against their red ochre
skin, revellers gathered around the campfire resembled those inside the
tent. A queer crew of naked and heinous creatures, demons, djinns, eidolons,
chimeras, aberrations, monsters and mutants of every description. A headless
hunchback was pushing her wheelchair in which Juan’s crumpled body resembled
an abandoned ventriloquist’s dummy. Eviscerated, skinned and impaled on a
spit, Saint Christopher’s blackened carcass was licked by flames as he
roasted over the fire.
’Hello Angelina.’ He said in a blithe attempt at levity. ‘When I said
I’d guide you here, I didn’t plan on staying. Much less becoming your
supper.’
When Angelina crawled forward to reach out her hand to him, he closed
his eyes and sniffed her fingers appreciatively with flared nostrils.
’Ah. Broth from the cauldron.’ He whispered with hushed gravitas. ‘How
very compassionate of you. I suppose you’re famished after all that
debauchery. I’d recommend a filet steak. Medium rare.’
Angelina urinated in the powdery red dust, scraping the mixture together
and forming small patties in her hands.
’Thanks,’ she cackled, ‘but I’m on a diet.’
J.S. BACH - Suites For Violencello
BOB DYLAN
MARK ROTHKO
